The Zapatista Uprising and the Poetics of Cultural Resistance

Abstract

ican government and their national intelligence service (CISEN). They instead would have us believe that the masked figure who is both military commander and spokesperson for the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) is none other than one Rafael Guillen, a Jesuit-educated, former university lecturer, born in 1957 in Tampico, northern Mexico.1 The story they wish to tell is of a man corrupted by the texts of Marx and Mao, a man so frustrated with the apathy of metropolitan campus life that he allowed himself to become embroiled in the more radical politics of violent subversion.2 And to some extent, they may in fact be right, but only, as academics might say, within the terms of their own discourse.3 And it is with this discourse - the discourse of Mexican officialdom, the discourse of government knows best, of government has the legitimacy to represent, the discourse of fact over fiction that Marcos, and the Zapatista rebels with whom his life is now so inextricably linked, take issue. It is not so much that Marcos never came from the city to the countryside to preach the revolutionary doctrines of MarxistLeninism, for this he freely admits, while still refusing to confirm his governmental identity. The story he himself tells, however, places greater emphasis on his encounter with Indian culture, an encounter that he claims changed him and the very principles upon which the thousands of Zapatista soldiers thought it necessary to fight. The nature of this change, and consequently the nature of the revolutionary movement to which Zapatismo gives its